Mentor to women who wish to take the lead in the relationship they have with their mothers.
a posture of kindness
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Nothing feels safer than when we are in the presence of another who is attuned to the dark, shameful places inside of us and yet has a posture of kindness rather than contempt. ~ Adam Young Counseling I believe humanity is moving out of a biological, evolutionary "need" for shame. We've got a ways to go. In the meantime, we still experience it and it can be debilitating and dysregulating (ask me how I know), especially when we're not aware when it's running the show. We need to know: #1 how to identify when we are experiencing shame #2 how stay safe in that experience #3 how tell ourselves the actual truth about shame #4 how to transmute it (which doesn't mean "just think positive!"), and #5 how to love ourselves through the experience What gets in the way of us doing that is the massive stigma around shame and the physiological experience of it. It's like if we say out loud that we're experiencing shame, it must mean we deserve to feel it...that the experience of shame somehow proves that we actually are worthless sacks of poo. It's so painful that we go into survival mode...so we subvert it and resist it with all our might, and it leaks out in ways we don't intend. It's our resistance to it that exhausts us and ::::whispers:::: turns us into our mothers. There's a kinder, gentler, and dare I say it – funner – way to relate to shame and I am going to sharing all about it next week to celebrate the first birthday of You Are Not Your Mother: Releasing Generational Trauma and Shame. We're going to talk about #1-5 above and being a kind presence who is attuned to the dark, shameful stories inside ourselves. Click here to register for free! Much, much love, Karen P.S. When you invite me into your life, whether here in these Love Notes, on my podcast, as a reader of my books, at an event, or as a 1:1 client, you're letting me know that, on some level, you are ready to be seen by me...and that you want me to show you what I see so you can change your relationship to shame. Even if it feels a little scary.
P.S.S. Check out Reclaiming My Dignity where I am exploring the intersection of body image, shame, feminism, diet culture, weight loss medication, and "taking the easy way out." |
Karen C.L. Anderson
Mentor to women who wish to take the lead in the relationship they have with their mothers.
...your mother treats you the way she does? "My therapist once told me: Imagine being bitten by a snake and instead of trying to help yourself heal and recover from the poison, you are trying to catch the snake to find out the reason it bit you and prove to it that you didn't deserve that." ~ Safe.Journal on Threads That's good advice, but...if you've spent years (or decades even) trying to figure out why your mother is the way she is, and why she treated the way she did, it might feel a bit...
(this one rambles...TL;DR it's okay to decide you want your relationships to be easy AND I am hosting a free event next month) I live in a small (six-year-old) neighborhood with 14 homes and a Homeowner's Association (HOA), which is required because there are seven acres of common area that need to be maintained according to the town's ordinances. Everyone who lives here was the first to occupy these homes. From the get-go there's been ONE neighbor who seems hellbent on making trouble:...
Earlier this week there was an article in my local newspaper about a mother who paid ten kids $50 to "beat and humiliate" her 13-year-old daughter. After sitting with my thoughts and feelings about it, I shared this on Facebook: These words will probably never reach the 13-year-old girl who's mother paid ten kids to "beat and humiliate" her, but I am going to say them anyway: May you know that even if you were disrespectful to your mother, this shouldn't have happened. I am so sorry that it...